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I use KDE Neon User Edition. It’s the most stable of the KDE Neon versions (the other two are the Stable Developer and Unstable Developer versions). All three of them are based on the latest Ubuntu LTS, like Mint. The User edition is a minimal installation of Ubuntu but with the newest KDE Plasma and application suite releases, while the Dev releases have pre-release versions of KDE software for testing.

Neon itself (even the User edition) is not envisioned by KDE as a full-fledged distro, but kind of as a technology demo for their latest software versions. It works pretty well as an actual distro, though, if you’re prepared to accept that you’re pretty much on your own for support, and that there’s one less layer of QA for the KDE software than you would get with Kubuntu or similar. After a new version of KDE software passes KDE’s QA, it gets released as Neon User, but before it can become a part of (for example) Kubuntu, it will be tested further by the Ubuntu devs who maintain Kubuntu, so you get more QA with Kubuntu, but the wait for the latest versions of KDE software is longer.

Normally I am biased toward the stability of more QA and more testing before trusting software, and that’s why I like the LTS base of Neon. As far as the KDE software itself, though, it’s been getting less buggy over time as KDE has really focused on fixing bugs and improving the quality of life issues.

KDE Plasma (the desktop environment made by KDE) has improved a ton since the most recent Kubuntu LTS. It will be the base of the next Kubuntu release, 20.04, due in April.

I do have a secondary installation of Kubuntu LTS to act as a fallback in case something happens with Neon, and I do many backups, so I can recover from disaster if one should take place. I’ve got three external hard drives and a backup server on my LAN (really just a spare PC with a lot of hard drives installed) for making backups, and backups on top of those backups.

I have way too many PCs, but there are three that I use on a daily basis. Right now I am writing this on my Dell G3 15.6″ gaming laptop. I also have a 13.3″ Acer Swift laptop and a desktop. The two laptops are relatively recent, purchased within the last couple of years, so they are both new enough to have been subject to the pre-Windows-10 embargo on newer CPU architectures, which means that running any other version of Windows on them is troublesome. As such, both have a vestigial Windows 10 installation present, but they’ve been crammed into the smallest partitions possible.

On the G3, I have a total of 1250 GB (1.25 TB) of storage between the two SSDs, and 1200 of the 1250 are for Linux. On the Swift, Windows is relegated to half of the onboard 64 GB eMMC (slower) storage, while the other half and the faster 1 TB SSD are for Linux.

On the desktop, I’ve got three SSDs and one 3 TB HDD installed. It wasn’t part of the plan for the desktop to end up with so many SSDs… initially, it had a 128GB SSD and a hard drive, but I managed to accumulate more SSDs, so why not use them? I have dual Intel and Marvell SATA adapters on my motherboard, allowing me to connect up to 12 SATA devices, and it’s a full tower case, so I may as well!

The slowest of the SSDs, a Hynix 128GB M.2 unit (SATA) in a 2.5 inch adapter, is now home to Windows 8.1. The G3 came initially with that slow SSD (by SSD standards) and a slow 1TB hard drive (by any standards). I quickly removed those in favor of a speedy NVMe x4 250GB SSD and the 1TB SATA SSD from my Asus F8, which was formerly one of my daily-use PCs. The F8 got the slow HDD, while the slow SSD went into the desktop, and I moved the Windows installation there to free up a faster SSD for more Linux stuff.

I don’t use Windows anymore other than testing things (to compare the bare-metal performance to that of Linux) and for reference. I have plenty of storage space, so the little bit that Windows uses is trivial, and I figure it’s better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.

I first tried Linux in the early 2000s before Windows 98 support was stopped. I used Xandros which had a customized KDE 3.14 desktop (Xandros 2). I liked it and found it clean and easy to use. You really noticed things when you tried some Gnome apps because they stood out and some were quite ugly compared to the KDE ones.

Besides my working computer I have three machines gathering dust. Two with XP on them and one with Win 98. I always thought it would be fun to try networking them together but never tried.

I have what is probably an unusual mix of setups regarding Linux and Windows on the same computers.

One computer has only Linux installed on it.

A second computer is triple-booting Windows XP, Vista, and Linux.

On the third computer, a laptop, it’s fairly simple to replace the hard drive, so that machine has ended up alternating between running Vista and Linux. Most of the time it runs Vista, but once in a while I’ll pop in the Linux HDD to update it.

There was no design or master plan behind any of this, it all kind of just happened over time as my level of comfort with installing and then relying on Linux continued to grow. So the first machine to get Linux was the laptop, on a separate HDD because I had no experience dual-booting Windows and Linux together; the second machine was the one sporting XP and Vista in addition to Linux; and then finally the last one with Linux only as it’s slated to become my daily driver with business software.

All these Linux systems are running Kubuntu with the KDE desktop, and are customized to provide varying degrees of visual likeness to Vista or Windows 7.

Using Debian 10 here with an SSD on an old Dell i5. Rock solid dependable for several years now.I have Windows on an old hard drive but haven’t used it in quite a while. I learned a few Linux tricks using Ubuntu and Mint at first, now I would rather customize it myself and Debian is the basis for them both. Using no-script on Firefox and run with no anti-virus and have never had a problem. I know that must sound crazy to Windows users. You’ll notice most of the infections on bleepingcomputer.com only affect Windows.

My first Linux experience was with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on an old (at the time of the initial installation it was 8 years old and had been running Windows Vista) HP laptop. 16.04 was OK, but I could take it or leave it. That was back in August 2017 when a bunch of Win 7 machines were hit with BSOD and I wanted a rainy day machine. I also wanted to test how much of a no-brainer updating/patching would be. It passed that test with flying colors; I installed every patch as it came down the pike and never had a problem.

Since then I upgraded to 18.04 LTS. Honestly, I hate it, but I keep it just as a rainy day machine.

I’ve got Mint Cinnamon 19.2 on an old (10 years old with a Centrino processor) Acer laptop that had been running Win 7 Pro but had just been sitting around for a few years. I installed after I upgraded the HP above to 18.04 and was hoping for a better Linux distro. I found it! I really like 19.2 Cinnamon. Does everything I need, is quite Win 7-like, is stable and snappy even on the old Centrino machine.

My first dual boot came on my old guinnea pig Win 7 32 bit machine that had 1 GB memory and an Intel Atom processor. A pretty doggy machine but a good one to try a dual boot with. It actually took 64 bit Mint 19.2 Cinnamon and runs pretty well, albeit a bit on the slow side

Based on the first dual boot, I did another dual boot just this last weekend on my daily driver Win 7 Dell Inspiron from back in 2016. Mint runs superbly on it. The only quirk is that the System Reports tells me my Intel Dual Band Wireless AC 3160 network adapter isn’t working, even though it obviously is. It seems like it wants me to install an iwlwifi backport in dkms format, but since i have no idea what that is I’ve ignored it, and as I say, internet connections seem to be just fine.

As far as I’m concerned, Mint is it. For a tad of perspective, I consider myself to be a non-techie, and I just need my computers to work with a minimum of fuss. So far, 19.2 more than satisfies those requirements.

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That’s my view too. When I tried the Pop! OS usb I found myself trying to make it work more like Windows before I could settle down and learn it. I could use the Gnome 3 desktop but didn’t like it.

It can be fun to putter. I once made a Halloween theme for one of my computers. It had a custom wallpaper, sounds, and a creepy font. (At boot up you were faced with wallpaper depicting a Mummy and a computer that said “I’m Alive!”. lol). But when it comes down to it I just want things to work and Linux Mint does that.

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Using Linux Mint Mate 19.2 dual booted with Win 7 Home Premium (64 bit) on an old (about 11 yrs old) Intel DG41TY. I installed Mint Mate on it in Oct 2019 to see if I could use it to replace Windows as I wanted NOTHING to do with Win 10. Used it almost exclusively till end of Dec 2019 and never had a problem. Installed all updates as they were offered. Have not returned to the Win 7 side of the PC since end of Dec. I love Mint Mate. It is so easy to use; not much different than Windows 7. This was important to me as I am a total dummy about most anything PC related (come with being an old codger whom time passed by). One of these days, when I am in the mood to tinker with it; I am going to reinstall Mint Mate to the entire hard drive and Windows will be history.

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My machines are installed with windows. I boot a Mint Mate 19.2 and a PureOS on SSDs via USB or eSATA . Several previous now unused on smaller drives back to Ubuntu when it went Unity (yuck)
The PureOS is going to be for banking and such.

🍻

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

Back in 2016 my brother loaned me a Dell laptop that he had put Linux Mint Cinnamon 17.3 on. I got accustomed to it and liked it a lot. I gave him his laptop back and then about a year later I got an old Sony VAIO laptop from my niece who wasn’t using it anymore.

I put a 250 GB SSD in the Sony (which had Vista) kept the old hard drive, and installed Linux Mint Cinnamon 19.1 on the SSD. That old Sony now runs better than when it was new and I still like the Linux Mint a lot and use it for going online. I’ve been learning more about Linux as time goes by and expect it will be my main OS as more time goes by.

I’m staying with Mint 19.1 for now but am not averse to trying other versions of Linux if I can obtain another computer to try them on.

Win 7 Still Alive, x64, Intel i3-2120 3.3GHz, Linux Mint 19.1

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By the end of last year tried ubuntu 18 LTS, and debian en linux mint on an 11 year old HP microtower dual core 4GB RAM PC. Went for the xfce version of Mint 19.2.(got a slow computer) Mint plays a bit snappier than ubuntu witch uses the gnome shell.Wanted a working system without to much fuss and this works out for me.

Also i’m maintaining W10 and W7.Although i’ll probably will never be using w10..but hey..it was already there.. so i’ll wait a little more before i ditch it.

95% of the time on Mint now….music, video, email, gimp …perfect!
W7 is used for the odd program that doesnt run on linux.
Foobar2000 portable running happily on Mint with “wine”.. Xonar d2x soundcard works well..
After Mint install..(like ubuntu too) almost everything worked out of the box..including the Nvidia driver
When it comes to choosing the right version of linux ….almost every distro can be customized to ur needs…choose a distro that leans towards what you want to do with it.. Theres slight bigger learningcurve if you start with debian. First ubuntu or MINT then debian or another distro seems a good way to go .Followed some videos people made and went from there….

Im staying on Mint for now cuz it suits my needs.layout feels like w7. allready infected a (dyhard w7-fan) friend of mine…he’s on linux mint 19.3

keep save..

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By the end of last year tried ubuntu 18 LTS, and debian en linux mint on an 11 year old HP microtower dual core 4GB RAM PC. Went for the xfce version of Mint 19.2.(got a slow computer) Mint plays a bit snappier than ubuntu witch uses the gnome shell.Wanted a working system without to much fuss and this works out for me.

It’s kind of funny how Ubuntu is sort of the standard base for distros aimed at regular people, including those migrating from Windows, yet the main version of Ubuntu itself, the one simply called “Ubuntu” with no qualifiers, persists in using the worst desktop environments. Both Unity and GNOME 3 were or are infected with the same “one UI to rule them all” idea that afflicts Windows 10. Unity’s very name is a reference to that idea.

As if that weren’t bad enough, the GNOME devs have taken the recent trend for minimalism to a rather absurd extreme, gutting the formerly powerful desktop environment of GNOME 2 (whose abandoned remains formed the basis of Mate, while Cinnamon was formed to make use of the advances in GNOME 3 while restoring the traditional and full-featured interface of GNOME 2). Anything that the GNOME devs think could possibly confuse a new user (and by that, I presume they mean someone who has never seen any kind of computing device before) is a target for deletion. Never mind that a person is only a completely new user for a short time, and then spends the rest of their life being a user with an ever-growing bit of experience… let’s design everything around the concept of the total computer/phone/tablet neophyte, even though those are becoming rarer than hen’s teeth.

My favorite example of this is how the GNOME devs have made the file load dialog so minimal that it no longer has an apparent text field into which the person may type or paste a filename or path! There’s no button for it either… you have to know the secret CTRL-L sequence to make it appear. People have asked the devs for a button or some other clue that the text field even exists, but the devs (who were the ones who removed the field in the first place) say NO, it’s not really a feature so much as an Easter egg for those who know about it.

Something as useful and necessary as a text input field is an Easter egg. I can’t think of a better example of what’s wrong with GNOME than that. Unfortunately, this particular decision affects many people who don’t even use GNOME 3, since so many Linux program use the GTK3+ toolkit, which includes the very same “minimal” GNOME 3 file picker as GNOME 3 itself. At least those of us not using GNOME don’t have to tolerate an entire UI based on the same ridiculous principles!

I’ve seen the same criticisms directed toward iOS and MacOS in the post-Jobs years. One commenter noted that MacOS seems to be designed to appeal to people trying things out in the Apple store, and not so much for people actually using the thing to get real work done. From what I’ve gathered, Apple also has eliminated the text input box in the file load dialog. Boggles my mind… when I use GTK 3+ programs, I am constantly using the CTRL-L “Easter egg.” I know it’s there, but it bothers me so much that it’s deliberately kept a secret!

Mate and Cinnamon are converging, it seems, now that Mate has decided to adopt the GTK3+ toolkit like Cinnamon did, which kind of makes Mate and Cinnamon two parallel versions of the same idea now. There’s been talk about merging the two, though I don’t know how likely that is. A lot of projects in open source seem like they should merge, but minor differences in philosophy and/or personality conflicts prevent it. We shall see, of course.

Group "L" (KDE Neon User Edition 5.18.5).

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My favorite example of this is how the GNOME devs have made the file load dialog so minimal that it no longer has an apparent text field into which the person may type or paste a filename or path! There’s no button for it either… you have to know the secret CTRL-L sequence to make it appear.

I would like to see these (un-)developers explain just how it’s friendly to novices to require them to know beforehand the key combination to execute a basic function that’s been hidden from the interface. Isn’t that the whole point of a GUI? It’s like we’re going back to the days of DOS.

I would like to see these (un-)developers explain just how it’s friendly to novices to require them to know beforehand the key combination to execute a basic function that’s been hidden from the interface. Isn’t that the whole point of a GUI? It’s like we’re going back to the days of DOS.

Ironically, I think they’ve concluded that the whole notion of typing or pasting a filename or pathname is gauche and passé, like the command line, and that using the GUI to navigate through the folder hierarchy, one by one, is the “modern” way of finding a given file. They don’t expect novices to know the key combination to make the text entry box appear; they expect them to not use it at all.

Back when MS-DOS was considered a viable operating system, there was a a dichotomy of opinion between those who favored the command line (like yours truly) and those who favored GUIs. At the time, I argued that if you knew what it was you wanted to accomplish, the GUI just got in the way.

I’ve changed my mind about GUIs since then. A well-designed GUI can give you the best of both worlds… simplicity and ease of understanding of what is being presented, but with the flexibility to get out of the way when necessary. The Windows file load dialog has been a good example of this; you could, if you wanted, type the path into the text input field just as you would have in MS-DOS, or you could copy/paste it. If you didn’t feel like doing that, or if you didn’t know exactly the whole path without having to look, you could navigate folder-by-folder graphically.

That’s how KDE does it too, of course. It’s one of the many reasons I have come to appreciate KDE Plasma so much recently (it was not long ago that I avoided Plasma because of all of its rough edges, most of which are gone now). Windows also had this right, though there was a regression with Windows Vista and 7 in Windows Explorer and the file picker dialogs: The up-folder button was omitted, with the thought being that it was unnecessary with the new path bar navigation that had been introduced. It returned with Windows 8 and remains in Windows 10, one of a small number of UI details that are actually better than in the beloved Windows 7.

Classic Shell had an option to restore the up button on Windows Explorer, and I did use that, but they didn’t add the up button back into the file load/save dialogs, and they had some specific reason for that, which I can’t remember at the moment. It was an annoyance when I used 7… I had been using the up-folder button for years in XP and previous versions of Windows, and I was used to it, even if the path bar was right there. The UI should adapt to me, not require me to adapt to it!

So many times, UI designers decide that some element isn’t necessary anymore, whether it be the Windows start button (in Win 8), the up folder button, the text input box in the file load dialog, the unread-tab state in Firefox, or some other thing. They don’t seem to grasp (or care, perhaps) that it’s up to the user to decide when something’s not necessary for his particular workflow or way of doing things. Remove it by default if you so wish, but at least have an option to bring it back, and not just with a secret keypress sequence.

Insisting that people laboriously navigate through the directory structure with a series of double clicks is a prime example of why I thought that GUIs would just get in the way.

Using both Linux Mint 18.3 and MX Linux 18. I’m pretty happy with MX Linux (you have a choice between no Systemd and Systemd, and MX Linux has a great toolbox), so I may move on from Mint at some point, as newer versions of Mint I’ve tested don’t run as well on my older stuff. I use XFCE, as it runs great on lower end systems, and I like the interface.

I’ve also installed Linux Lite (rock solid, fast, and easy for newbies) for other users. And I have a couple of Win10 machines around (mostly to keep my Windows skills fresh, as I help other Windows users), though I do very little on them…I’m 98% on Linux now, started about 10 years ago, and love it.

The best Linux to use is one that you’re comfortable with, and one that works well on your hardware, so happy distro hopping!

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The best Linux to use is one that you’re comfortable with, and one that works well on your hardware,

True words.

Two things I would add:

People should do their research before actually trying to install something – especially if they have older computers. I thought I did enough research on Pop! OS but couldn’t install it on my computer due to differences between it an Windows. The issues raised by that failed install effected my later Linux Mint install and I had to start from scratch.

People need to evaluate their tech skill and how much effort they want to put into the distro they choose. I had installed Linux before and used it for years but it was like Mint in that it offered an “install alongside” option to dual boot or an option to let the installer set everything up if you are replacing your OS. If you are not familiar with creating partitions- for example- small mistakes can have unseen consequences. (My first install of Linux Mint had boot issues and partition problems.)

It may take a bit of time to get comfortable with a new OS. Just take your time and have fun!

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Plus one to Firemind’s two points. I did an involved software inventory and research into Linux alternatives before I built my new machine. It kept getting postponed due to new hardware coming or waiting for new CPUs with chip vulnerability fixes to roll out.

I have 4 PCs running Linux, 2 laptops and 1 desktop. All are Linux only. We have 2 Windows 7-64Pro PCs, a primary desktop and a laptop (not covered here) and an iPad Pro.

Desktop Box 1 is a 2 month old self-built desktop built specifically to run Linux Mint-Cinnamon 19.3 with the newest 5.3 kernel. It is an ASUS PRIME Z390-A motherboard with a Samsung PCIe 1TB 970 EVO NVMe SSD. Due to a DDR4 RAM blowout sale it has 32GB of ram (in case the planned Linux migration failed and I had to join the Windows 10 Borg). The second drive is a Crucial 1TB MX300 SATA SSD, and the third drive is a WD Black 1TB spinner. I have an EVGA nVidia GTX-1660Ti GPU and a DVD/CD burner for ripping CDs.

This is destined to be the primary box to replace my 9 year old self-built gaming PC with Intel DX58SO2 and i7-960 and an nVidia GTX-660Ti GPU running Windows 7-64Pro. That is being relegated to certain Windows only games and compatibility software like Office 2010 and Outlook 2010. I ‘may’ update it with an SSD.

Laptop 1 is my wife’s primary PC, a Lenovo refurbed Win7-64Pro Thinkpad T420 with an i7 running Linux Mint-Mate 18.3 on a new SSD. She has been a Linux-only user since 2012 with her old ex-Vista AMD laptop using Ubuntu until the ancient graphics hardware made upgrading too difficult. For her, she wants a PC to work always, and have a familiar interface that is not changing constantly. The Mate desktop (specifically menues) looked similar to Windows.

Laptop 2 is an ASUS ASUS_1225 eeePC netbook that now runs Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. It was bought with Windows 7-64Pro, but became too slow during the GWX and cumulative patching era. I swapped out the WD HDD for a Crucial SSD and installed the Ubuntu 16.04LTS which is much faster. I used to use that while on travel for watching DVDs and email and surfing, but it has been largely replaced by an iPad Pro. It will soon get Mint-Mate or Cinnamon.

Desktop Box 1 is a 2 month old self-built desktop built specifically to run Linux Mint-Cinnamon 19.3 with the newest 5.3 kernel.

FYI, while 5.3 is the newest kernel that is offered by Ubuntu for 18.04 (the basis for Mint 19.x), it’s not the newest kernel, full stop. As far as the Linux kernel team (part of the Linux Foundation, which operates independently of Ubuntu) is concerned, 5.3 reached end of life in December 2019! The current kernels from their perspective are 5.4 (a LTS release, which will continue to receive updates from the kernel team for years to come) and 5.5, with 5.6 just around the corner.

Note that the two uses of the term LTS (Ubuntu and kernel) are not related to one another. The kernel team offers LTS releases to make it easier for distros to offer LTS releases themselves, but the distro can choose to make its own LTS kernel too. While 5.3 won’t be receiving any more updates from the Linux kernel team, it will continue to get updates from Ubuntu, who will take any important changes that are made to newer kernels and backport them to 5.3, do their own testing, and push out the modified kernel when they think it’s ready. Each of the big distros do this, changing bits of the kernel as they see as appropriate for their distro.

The new Ubuntu LTS scheduled for release next month will be 20.04, and that will contain the 5.4 LTS kernel as its default. The KDE version of Ubuntu 20.04, known as Kubuntu 20.04, will also feature the KDE Plasma LTS release, 5.18, which the KDE devs offer as a LTS for the same reason the kernel devs offer theirs… to make it easier for distros that want a LTS version.

It makes sense for Kubuntu 20.04 to use the LTS releases for various important bits of its components, as that will reduce the workload on the Ubuntu devs.

So Linux Mint 19.3 on 4 laptops and the latter HP ProBook actually able to Run Blender 3D 2.8/later under Mint 19.3 whereas the same laptop under Windows 7 can not make use of Blender 2.8/later(Crashes in edit mode under 7/Pro). So Blender 2.8/later running stable under Mint 19.3 and the ProBook using open source drivers only and Blebder 2.8/later not working too well when the laptop is booted into 7/Pro and AMD’s/Intel’s Windows drivers.

And that Blender 2.8/later result just shows that on the HP ProBook Linux(Mint) is getting better/continued support on that older generation Ivy bridge processor based laptop than under Windows 7/7 Pro which is EOL. 7/7 Pro is pretty much legacy as is that Ivy Bridge/integrated graphics and AMD Radeon 7650M(Terascale GPU micro-architecture) under Windows 7 but under Linux/Mint 19.3 older hardware gets continued support relative to Windows 7.

Does anyone track the first Linux distro/distros that will ship with Kernel 5.6. And that’s what I’m waiting for mostly for my newest laptop in order to have the proper AMD APU fan control/driver support and the laptop not starting up with the fan set to low RPM and staying there resulting in CPU/Integrated GPU severe down-clocking issues. So I’m mostly looking for a bleeding edge distro with kernel 5.6 support that’s close to what Linux Mint offers for DEs and UI/System Software features. And what is the average wait time for any new Linux Kernel release to actually make it into most of the distros.

I’ve been trying out various Linux distros for the past 10 years. First one I tried was a Mandriva distro in early 2010. It showed much promise as a viable Windows alternative but still seemed a bit clunky for an average Windows user to adapt to. I tried a few other distros over the years, including Knoppix and Ubuntu. I discovered Linux Mint Cinnamon a couple of years ago, and set up my new Acer laptop to dual boot Windows 10 and Mint 19. Worked nicely until Windows 10 updated to version 1809, which blew away my dual boot capability. So now my Acer is running only Windows 10, again updated, to v1909. I took my 10 year old Toshiba Satellite Pro, wiped the hard drive, and installed Linux Mint 19.2, which has now been updated to 19.3 Cinnamon. Runs well on the old Centrino processor and 3GB of RAM. I find Linux has made great progress in the past 10 years in the area of user friendliness. Still a little clunky in some areas, but definitely a viable alternative to Windows now. Since Windows 10 doesn’t like to play very nice alongside Linux, I decided not to attempt another dual boot arrangement on my Acer, opting instead to install Virtualbox and run several Linux distros side by side in virtual machines. Great way to test various distros to compare features as well as shortcomings.

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My wife and I use Linux Mint 19.3 with the Cinnamon at home almost exclusively starting about a year before Windows 7 End of Lifed. I was able to set up my non-technical wife’s desktop to look and work almost exactly like her windows 7 desktop. My son prefers Ubuntu. I have a few machines that can dual boot Windows 10 for the odd case where I have to run Windows such as doing my taxes with Tax Cut software. I often go months without booting Windows.

I prefer Linux Mint because it is easy to use, highly customizable and there is tons of free open source software. I prefer Linux over Windows because Linux does not track and report my every move as Windows does and it is easier and cheaper to use. I do support the open source movement by making an annual donations to Linux Mint, Mozilla, Libre Office and other open source organizations.

At work I’ve managed to get one of my machines converted to Linux Mint but still have one using Windows 10 to run SAP software and other Windows only software.

You might want to take a look at OpenSuSE Tumbleweed, a distribution that is built using the latest versions of kernels and packages. The maintainers do a great job of providing rolling updates, even when I delay the application of upgrades for several months. SuSE is a major distribution used quite extensively in Europe.

I dual-boot it with the KDE desktop on a MacBook Pro and it handles the hardware – which has both Intel and Nvidia graphics – without issues.

I have Manjaro on my laptop. I’ve tried a bunch of different distributions which eventually gave me trouble as I used them. Manjaro never has. I still use Windows 10 on my desktop and I have a Surface Pro tablet which also uses Windows, of course. (I managed to defeat the Windows lock on the tablet BIOS and installed Manjaro but it was pretty buggy on the tablet. Obviously, it wasn’t made for a touchscreen.)

I have both Ubuntu 18 and a recent install of UbuntuDDE 20 beta running in VirtualBox on my main Windows 7 machine. And I just wiped Win 7 from an old Lenovo Thinkpad T42 with only 1.5Gb memory and loaded Lubuntu 16 on it. (I know, that amount of memory is inadequate for Windows).

A previous poster stated correctly IMHO that the standard Ubuntu desktop is boring and looking “old fashioned” these days.

UbuntuDDE is only beta (based on Unbuntu 20), but it looks and feels so much nicer. As I continue to try this one out, I can see me jumping onto this for real use going forward.

The old laptop with Lubuntu looks and feels fresh again, and I now feel comfortable donating this to a charity, i.e. a working laptop for someone in need, rather than an unworkable Win7 old device.

Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS dual-booted with Windows 7, although I very rarely use Windows on this machine any longer. I used Ubuntu 16.04 prior to this and I have to say I liked it better than 18. It seems I’m not alone in this.

I have Windows 7 on a workstation PC that I need to keep running thanks to a big collection of computer graphics and music programs, not all of which will work under Wine. Eventually I want to take that off-line most of the time, and Linux will be my main ‘front end’. A distro that minimises the gnashing of teeth on my part will be crucial – it’s not that I’m a computer dunce, I just don’t want to be distracted too much from what I actually want to use the computer for.

The opinions in this thread will be very helpful in sorting this out. So far I’m hearing ‘Mint’ quite a lot… I had a version on an old laptop (not sure which version, it was around ten years ago) but didn’t get on with it. Judging by the praise I’m reading above I should check Mint out again.

First Device: NUC Skylake Core-M5 PC. Runs Windows 10, upgraded many times, now on 1909 Pro. Dual-Boot with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, soon to be upgraded to 20.04 LTS. Like GNOME with Shell Enhancements. Hate Wayland graphics, but don’t want to run Unity just to revert to X11 graphics. Wayland has way too much “security” lockdown. Without a Command you can’t even launch a binary application (most any program) with Root privileges, among other pieces of insanity. Also unstable with X-based applications (which include way too many standard apps). Kernel 5.3 for Ubuntu does keep getting updates. Ubuntu does not clean up after kernel updates, making Ubuntu Cleaner (successor to Janitor) and Synaptic Package Manager good tools to have on the Launcher (Favorites) Bar.

Second Device: Chromebook ASUS Flip c302 — Intel Core-m3 based: Originally used the Reynhout CHRX install script to create a Gallium OS (Ubuntu for Chromebook) dual-boot in there. But at the time, Gallium OS was not keeping up with the Ubuntu LTS upgrade cadence. So I went over to Fedora. But with Fedora 30 there was no longer support for Fedora in the CHRX script. I use the Xfce Desktop Environment, due to resource limitations in the Chromebook. Presently I have replaced Chrome OS with Fedora 31 in there, but with a newer CHRX script version I might try to reestablish the dual-boot. Xfce is a very limited environment, and a lot of Fedora software does not work properly in there. Also, the Linux and Chromebook keyboards are different, which means reconfiguring for the hardware using keymapping tables and scripts. That is a real pain to do!

Fedora uses a rolling update strategy, which means it always updates to the latest version of everything. Including using the Linux 5.4 kernels. Ubuntu takes a more conservative approach, and Version 18.04 LTS sticks with kernels not newer than the 5.3 Ubuntu series. Fedora also cleans up and limits how many old kernels are retained, unlike Ubuntu which tends to retain more old kernels. I don’t like a lot of clutter in GRUB2, so I manually clean out older Ubuntu kernels, retaining three as does Fedora. Fedora also uses RPM installers and DNF, as opposed to Ubuntu’s DEB installers and Synaptic (Apt) Package Manager. Fedora also has forced me into its Command Line more than Ubuntu. I prefer to remain within a GUI environment, not being very technical.

So, for a normal PC, I would use Ubuntu or Mint, and stick with GUI applications wherever possible. Only manually update anything in Linux if there is no other choice. Otherwise, stick with your distro’s repositories. And customize for function, not appearance. Every system-level update can wreck hours of customizations, and often there is no going back. So when something changes in your distro, it is what it is. Including the Ubuntu abrupt transition from Unity-X to Gnome-Wayland and all the issues that has caused me. Trying to turn back the clock within a distro is just asking for a world of hurt, in my experience.

So choose what feels best in a Live USB test run, and be prepared to switch distros if you don’t like the direction your first choice is going. Your data will transfer, and sometimes your settings. Much of your software will also still be available. Unlike Windows, you are not stuck with whatever the developers decided to change this time around.

Slight footnote: Fedora and Ubuntu belong to different Linux Families. Their software is generally not interchangeable. Within the Debian Family (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, etc.) there is much better cross-distro compatibility for software and settings. Mint offers the least learning curve for most Windows and Apple users. Fedora is a bit more advanced, and distros like Suse, Mandriva and Arch can be very challenging for beginners.

Unless you have a specific need for a non-Debian distro, your best bet is to stick with Mint or Ubuntu. At least at first.

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I see your “warning” about Arch Linux, but I think if you gave Manjaro a try, you would like it. It has as friendly an install process as Ubuntu or Mint, and the underlying Arch OS is speedy and full-featured, with a rolling update process that continues to amaze me, compared to Windows, with OS updates that do NOT require a reboot and most often don’t even require you to restart application with updates.

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I dual-boot Win10Pro with Linux Mint19.3,MATE. About the only reason for Win10 on my main machine is to use TurboTax. I also use the Bionic Pup version of Puppy Linux, and antiX Linux. I also enjoy distro hopping, using MultiBootUSB to view, and check the distros out. Been using Linux since 1998, and am very happy with Mint.

No one has mentioned that you can run Linux off of a USB. This is the way I try out new versions. Many versions of Linux have “live” versions which is to say they will run, have limited software, and are generally used to create an install version. They simply will not store any changes. These can run off of a CD or a USB

For a Windows user wanting to know what things look like and feel like, to use the live version or the installed to usb version is a way to test without threatening your Windows installation.

I am presently using Mint 18.3 and MX 18 and am presently typing this on a version of Mint running of a USB. Both versions remember what someone wants who uses a computer as a working machine.

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I tried both Linux Mint and Pop! OS on Live USB before installing. It’s a great way to make sure a distro works on your system and then can be used as a sort of rescue cd when your system won’t start up.

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I am similar to other users who have multiple computers in their home, I have 5 desktops and two laptops. While I have used Windows for almost my entire working career (I’m retired now), I have recently become disenchanted with Windows because I believe the current OS is too bloated with “features” of increasingly doubtful utility to many users. And don’t get me started about how Microsoft, Apple and Google (among others) want to suck all your personal data into their corporate bottoms lines.

I am reminded of the Windows 95 installation, where you could choose to install a minimal system, without a lot of the fluff pieces that never interested me. I miss the option to install a bare minimum Windows 10 system, letting me add services and “features” on an as-needed basis. I feel that Microsoft has created a system which they feel must be interconnected both internally and externally (to the Internet) in so many ways to so many installed applications that the reliability and performance of the system must suffer with so many processes vying for CPU, Ethernet and graphics processor time.

With that in mind, I have been experimenting with various Linux distros, primarily because I believe they perform better without all the interconnected apps, and also because their is not a large corporate personal data vacuum cleaner with a desire to learn everything that is discoverable about me.

I have most of my machines dual-booting into either Linux Mint 19.3 or Manjaro 19, along side Windows 10, with one of my oldest machines (an HP Media Center PC) configured to boot Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows Vista x86 (to allow me to play some older 16-bit games) and Manjaro 19.

I may have to keep some Windows 10 machines around for some special programs, but my future looks more and more like one where Linux will be my primary home OS.

Since I moved into a small condo, I no longer have space for all the laptops/desktops I used to have. Now I run Linux Mint 19.+ on a homemade desktop and run Windows 7 in a virtual machine ( I have to access a security system that is compatible with IE only). Other than that, since I retired from a tech support job, I haven’t used Windows of any kind.

I like the stability of Linux. I have a PBX running on a Raspberry Pi that only gets rebooted if I s*** it up by making changes.

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One cheap laptop for traveling, running Kubuntu 19.10. Then a powerful laptop for use around the house running KDE Neon/dual boot Win10 in case I need something proprietary. An old netbook with a broken SATA controller, running Debian 10 from a USB stick, command line boot, startx for JWM.

I’ve used KDE since version 2. I think it is the most complete and flexible DE available. Neon gives me a good preview of what is to come so when I upgrade my main workstation there are few surprises. Performance has been steadily improving, both in memory usage and startup times.

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I’ve used KDE since version 2. I think it is the most complete and flexible DE available. Neon gives me a good preview of what is to come so when I upgrade my main workstation there are few surprises. Performance has been steadily improving, both in memory usage and startup times.

Very much agreed on the improvement bit. KDE has long had the reputation of being a bloated, slow mess, but it’s not anymore. It has initial RAM usage numbers that are not too far off from the lightweight Xfce, and as good or better than middle of the road (as far as RAM usage) desktops like Cinnamon. It’s responsive and very usable on my slow, RAM-limited (not upgradeable) Acer Swift 1.

I started with Kubuntu when I moved away from Mint (it had an issue that caused shorter battery life on the Swift laptop, and I keep all my PCs configured as much the same as I can), and I had tried Neon in the past, but as soon as Neon rebased from 16.04 LTS to 18.04, I moved to Mint and didn’t look back. There were a number of rough edges and bugs in Kubuntu that had been fixed in the more recent releases in Neon, and I didn’t want to have to wait for the continued bug fixes. Normally, sticking with LTS releases instead of the latest and greatest means less bugs and more stability, but KDE has been so focused on bug fixing in the most recent releases that it was quite the opposite.

One example of this is still in play now. On paper, Kubuntu LTS 20.04 looks like it should be more up-to-date than Neon, as the as-yet unreleased Kubuntu has things like Mesa 20, Plasma 5.18, etc., already baked in, on a base that is more up to date than the 18.04 that underlies Neon still.

I upgraded my Kubuntu 18.04 installation on my Dell G3 to Kubuntu 20.04 beta, and I was dismayed to see the return of a bug that I had thought was long vanquished. Because of a long-standing bug in the proprietary driver that nVidia shows no interest in fixing, some things get corrupted when the PC is put into S3 (suspend-to-ram, usually known as sleep) and resumed. In KDE Plasma, this manifests most noticeably in the corrupted captions for icons on the desktop after resuming.

The KDE devs had long avoided working around the bug, insisting that it was nVidia’s job to fix it (they’re not wrong about that bit), but they relented and fixed the issue, though the fix would only actually work when the Qt library was updated to 5.13. The initial release of Qt 5.13 was too buggy for KDE’s liking, but when 5.13.1 came along, they pushed that to Neon, and the long-standing corruption of the icon captions after S3 was finally fixed.

So when I booted 20.04 for the first time and put it into S3, I was dismayed to see the return of the bug. I didn’t know if it was known to anyone else… it’s on my Dell G3, which uses nVidia’s Optimus/Prime technology for GPU switching, so I initially went to the Ubuntu quality IRC channel to see if anyone knew that the bug was back.

I didn’t get a reply, so I investigated further, and it dawned on me why the bug was back… Kubuntu had not moved on from Qt 5.12.8, even in this brand-new, not-even-released-yet version. I got the update to Qt 5.13.1 six months ago on Neon!

I really hope they won’t release 20.04 with this antiquated version of Qt, but at this late stage, it looks like that is the plan.

KDE Neon will rebase again a few months after the Ubuntu LTS release, most likely, and they certainly will bring along the updated Qt version. I really wanted to be enthusiastic about the latest and greatest Kubuntu, but I won’t be using it for anything beyond testing with Qt 5.12.*.

Is that bug only acting up when you put your computer to sleep and then wake it up, not when you shut it down and then start it up again later?

Only when sleeping and waking up, and only with nVidia cards that are using the nVidia driver (which is most people with nVidia, I think, as the open Nouveau drives are pretty bad, since nVidia is not cooperating).

Does it go away if you reboot the computer?

Yes, and it doesn’t even require that. I have a shell script to fire a single-line command to restart the Plasma shell, and that fixes it in just a second or two. Before the bug was fixed, someone wrote a script to create a service that would automatically restart Plasma coming out of sleep, and that would still be useful running any of the Kubuntus in their current config with Nvidia.

It’s not a huge issue, but it’s a long-standing, much-hated bug that was fixed 6 months ago in both Plasma and Qt, and even the latest and greatest Ubuntu (that carries the fixed Plasma version) is still using the old Qt library that was not fixed yet.

Is KDE the one with a slider for adjusting more or less continuously the size of the icons and the screen controls? Is it only available for Kubuntu?

KDE used to be the name of the desktop environment, but now KDE is the organization that writes the software. The desktop environment itself is called Plasma now. A lot of people still shorthand it as “KDE” because that’s ingrained from before there was a Plasma, but it’s not strictly correct anymore.

KDE Plasma is the desktop environment I mentioned as having a scaling slider. It’s not necessary to change icon sizes, though, as each desktop has icon size options already (Cinnamon has 5 choices). The feature you seek is called fractional scaling, and there’s some good news… it’s coming to Cinnamon really soon. The next release of Cinnamon will, according to devs, have fractional scaling. I have no idea if they will push that to Mint 19.3 or wait until the next Mint release based on Ubuntu 20.04, but it’s been announced.

Kubuntu is simply the version of Ubuntu that has the KDE Plasma desktop preinstalled. There used to be a Mint version with Plasma too, but they discontinued it a while ago, I think for the release of Mint 18. There are a lot of desktops with KDE, though, like Neon (based on Ubuntu, like Mint, but with all of the KDE-related stuff updated separately), Manjaro KDE, and lots of others. The features and bug fixes they have will depend on what packages the distro has chosen.

If you want the newest KDE stuff, there’s Neon if you prefer the Ubuntu family, and I don’t know much outside that. The user version of Neon releases new versions of KDE software as soon as it passes KDE’s QA, typically the day after the general release of whatever the thing is in question. It’s not beta software, but there’s one less layer of redundant QA performed by the distro, so it might at times be more buggy.

On the other hand, we have this bug I mentioned that is still in all the versions of Kubuntu, but not in Neon… and that kind of thing is why I moved to Neon. KDE has been doing a lot of bug fixing in the last couple of years, and so their newest Plasma releases often have fixes for bugs that are still present in the slower-to-update Kubuntu. It was my desire for bug fixes, more than new features, that led me to Neon… kind of reverse of the normal paradigm, but there you have it.

I did test Manjaro KDE for a bit, and it was considerably more up to date than the LTS Kubuntu that was current then, but it didn’t give me a compelling reason to consider switching. Based on Arch, it uses a rolling release model (a real one, not a pretend one like Microsoft uses now with Win 10), so there are no periodic releases like Ubuntu 20.04, but that introduces its own potential set of problems.

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Linux Mint 19.2 (Tina), Xfce on my Linux-only test notebook with 2GB RAM – quite an ancient machine. This machine was born as a Windows XP and it used to run Win7 nicely.

I am stuck at Mint 19.2 because it seems to me that it is faster than the updated 19.3. With xf-panel installed (a UI-settings backup utility available at Mint’s Software Manager), one can set the UI to a predefined theme that really resembles Win7. It is called Redmond.

Other laptops: humble WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) version 1 with Ubuntu 18.04. Unfortunately, there is no Mint for WSL. On the other hand, Linux Mint 19.2 is based on Ubuntu 18.04 so the command-line interface is roughly the same. It is quite amazing to see software which is compiled for Ubuntu (or even Debian, since Ubuntu comes from Debian) and see it running inside Windows 10 Pro in a hardware which has no support for virtualization (nor software emulation).

In another forum I posted how Linux seemed to be getting “boring” because I was getting comfortable with it again. I have been using Linux Mint 19.3 as my sole OS for over a month now and don’t miss Windows 7. I use Linux versions of Teamspeak, Firefox, and Thunderbird, play the same online games (some through Wine/Lutris), and have found alternatives for other apps.

If I had gotten Pop! OS to work on my computer I wonder if i would have stayed with it because I don’t like the Gnome 3 DE. I like the way Mint works and looks and it fits me at the moment.

If you are looking into Linux do some research and pick a distro that you like the look of and are comfortable with. Try it out on a Live USB before installing.

Try one of the “easy” distros like Linux Mint and stick with it for a bit until you learn more about Linux. When and if you are ready you can move on to other distros.

So apparently without the driver fix(Kernel 5.6/later) my ASUS Tuf FX505DY(Ryzen 5 3550H/Radeon RX 560X) can boot into Linux but will overheat because the Processor fan gets stuck in quiet(Low RPM) fan mode at boot up and stays in low RPM mode only and that causing the laptop to be heavily throttled for lack of proper fan speed control in older Kernels.

I’m really wanting to dual boot 10/Linux Mint on the TUF laptop and continue to use Windows as far as 10/1809’s EOL at least and 1809’s getting its EOL extended until Nov 2020. But reading above that sometimes 10/Linux dual boots have issues I’m maybe just going to overwrite the 10 partition when 10/1809 goes EOL or just not let 10/1809 online after it goes EOL just like I’m doing with my old 7/EOL and Mint dual boot laptops.

But really I’m fine on Linux Mint with the older laptops currently and getting better performance under the Linux Kernel than under Windows 7’s Kernel. And I’ll just make use of the Tuf/Windows 10 Home laptop offline mostly(Waiting on April 2020’s DEFCON3) until Mint/Other Distros start getting Linux Kernel 5.6 available. And I’m not a Linux Power user so maybe I better wait until the Linux Kernel 5.6 makes it into the Distro via the Distro’s maintainers offering it rather than some generic 5.6 Kernel that’s not been vetted by the Distro’s maintainers.

I’m using kernel 5.6.4 mainline now, the fourth bugfix release of the 5.6 kernel, and it’s working quite nicely. Some people suggest waiting until a few bugfix releases are out for a given mainline kernel before using it, and this one has that.

I know that Ubuntu says mainline kernels are for testing, while only official kernels should be used for anything else. I generally do prefer official kernels, but a lot of people do use mainline kernels beyond testing on Ubuntu and derivatives, and there’s nothing “bad” about it just because it does not have the Ubuntu stamp of approval. Ubuntu hasn’t released what I consider a decent kernel since October, and I’m more keen to avoid the bugs I know are 100% certain to manifest in any currently-supported 5.x Ubuntu kernel than the potential bugs that could exist in mainline. I could also use the old kernel from October, but I’ve been pleased with how the mainline kernels work.

There are some downsides running a mainline kernel, like how the mainline kernels are not available in signed form for Secure Boot, but if there are known issues with the official kernels, I’d much rather use mainline kernels than put up with the bugs or use Windows 10 until Ubuntu gets around to offering the newer kernels. It could be quite some time before that happens, and in my case at least, I’ve already waited half a year! It could be six more before they offer something better.

’m really wanting to dual boot 10/Linux Mint on the TUF laptop and continue to use Windows as far as 10/1809’s EOL at least and 1809’s getting its EOL extended until Nov 2020. But reading above that sometimes 10/Linux dual boots have issues I’m maybe just going to overwrite the 10 partition when 10/1809 goes EOL or just not let 10/1809 online after it goes EOL just like I’m doing with my old 7/EOL and Mint dual boot laptops.

I have seen those reports too, though I can’t say for sure how often that might happen. On a UEFI system, resetting the boot to re-enable the dual boot after Windows 10 stomps all over it should be quite easy, presuming that it simply reinstalls its own bootloader. Just go into the UEFI (“BIOS”) settings and set Ubuntu (that’s how it represented itself last time I used Mint) as the bootloader instead of Windows, and that should do it. There’s no need to overwrite anything as there would be using a MBR/legacy boot.

Wow, linux is wonderful. I’m running Sparky Linux on an old HP 17 IN. Screen laptop. Dv9500 Pavillon that ran Windows Vista. So I put a new hard drive in , reformatted , and loaded Sparky, with 4 gigs of ram , and its fast. Amazing how everything works. I’ve been running almost a year and have NOT had any problems. Smooth, It comes with Firefox Quantum clean fast and you can filter all the junk out. Thing is I feel safe on this thing. I have 4 other desktops with windows 10 on them that the grankids play games on. This is dying down, I will put new hard drives in them and run some sort of linux and ditch windows 10. No more non sense. I recommend Sparky Linux.

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I am using a triple boot laptop :). Ok, it is not realy a triple boot. My laptop sports two SSDs. One of them is dedicated to Win10 (for the job) and the other disk has dual boot (Win7Ent and Linux Mint 19.3 MATE). I am actively using Linux Mint MATE for my personal stuf since 15 years at least (sticking with LTS editions). Never been disapointed. I had installed it on a variety of mashines, newer and older hardware – every time I was amazed by the ability of finding all the hw, stability and performance of this very polished distro. Plus it is very well equiped with software out of the box – a rare sense of equilibrium, IMHO.

I would recommend Linux Mint MATE to anybody searching for an alternative to Windows. Still, I have to admit that, if an average user is running into hardware problems with LM, it is quite difficult to solve them despite the excelent support from forums. This is a point where someone could be reluctant to the Linux adventure (regardless if it is Mint or other distro).

Someone said in a post before that you should test well the distro before turning to the Linux of choice. This is my opinion too. Learn a litle bit how to float before taking the jump into the swiming pool :). Maybe, the best way to do that is running the Linux from a stick or an external disk. Linux Mint does a wonderful job in this scenario too.

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First got into Linux back in 1994! I started with Slackware on a used i386 with 4MB of RAM! It required a pile of diskettes to install. UGH! It was a steep learning curve at that time since it required manual editing of conf files galore. I learned a lot though! Best training one could get. Over the years I tried many different flavours of Linux: Debian, RedHat, Slackware, MEPIS, Madrake, Knoppix, CentOS, SUSE, Gentoo besides a few others. I also had Smoothwall 3.1 running my Internet gateway for over a year (it was rock solid on a Pentium III-350). At one point I had at least 7 functioning computers in my home, all networked and running various flavours of Linux and Windows!

Currently, my primary PC is a MacBook Pro 13″ w/Touchbar (2017). However, I installed Parallels Desktop on it so I could run Windows 10 (for the few programs that I require which are not available on Mac). I also created another virtual machine for running Linux Mint 19.2 Mate. I’m not using it that often to be honest, but I like to keep my hands in it from time to time. I really like Linux Mint Mate. It was a breeze to install and runs flawlessly even in my Parallels virtual machine. I have an old Windows 7 computer (11 years old) that still runs well. I have considered replacing it with Linux Mint to be a server as it still has a ton of old files on it on a couple of spare hard drives.

“Been paying these people for 3 years and finally had enough and moving to VMware Fusion, which is much better. Straw that broke my back was Parallels insistence on showing me ads for their other products every week. I tried opting-out, tried opening support cases, these people just don’t care. If you’re trying to play a game this *MIGHT* work for you. If you need to run VM’s or do anything business-related or “mission-critical” stay far away.”

Now “showing me ads for their other products every week” might mean a number of different things (assuming this “ads showing” complaint is true). If it is just an email once a week or so, not a problem for me. I do get those from various companies that I once bought something from. I have a quick look to each and, most likely than not, I delete them. It might take me maybe three minutes total every week to dispose of those. Some of those emails might even be interesting and I keep. But if the ads come in the middle of a session, popping up on screen when I am trying to do something that requires no interruptions, then that would quite a different story.

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I have NEVER had ads from Parallels popping up on my screen. I suspect that user may have been using a trial version or something. On the other hand, since that post appears to have been on Apple’s App Store, perhaps there’s a difference in using the Parallels software from the App Store vs. the Parallels software downloaded from the developer’s site, which is what I did. I’d rather purchase programs such as these direct from the developer. In this case I’ve had no issues.

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I am curious as to what Linux you are using and whether you are dual-booting with Windows (or something else) or not.

Whatever works best, and I’m not so limited as to only run Linux. Lots of (X)ubuntu though because it’s the lazy option to get things “just working”. I mean, weird server hardware often has “driver disks” or at least driver .deb packages for *Ubuntu and RHEL, and desktop-side hardware has more for Ubuntu than for RHEL these days.

I mean, on *this* system I’m running Xubuntu 18.04 LTS, with VMs of Windows 8.1, OpenIndiana (descendant of OpenSolaris) and Centos.

Then there’s that one weird thing (low-end Bay Trail mini-laptop with eMMC storage and touchscreen) running GalliumOS… because nothing else that I tried worked right on that thing.

Then there’s that one thing with NetBSD … oh and the kids have that one silly thing with Raspbian…

A number of systems in the house dual-boot Windows and Linux. Some of these only theoretically as the Windows side has been untouched for years.

Apart from the bewildering choice of distros, the other reason that I have not got any further with at least a partial switch to Linux is my concern about privacy.

In Windows I use the 3rd party program Windows Firewall Control to enhance the Windows Firewall. This blocks outgoing access by default and unless there is an explicit rule to allow outgoing access, provides a notification allowing a new outgoing rule (to either allow or block access) to be setup.

Is it possible to achieve something similar (blocking/allowing outgoing access on a program/process by program/process basis) in any Linux distro?

Do some distros make this sort of thing easier than others?

Do Linux users just allow all outgoing accesses and trust (Linux itself and) 3rd party programs (not being from say Microsoft or Google) not to abuse their privacy?

Clearly some programs need outgoing access to function (browsers, e-mail clients …), but for others there is no obvious need yet they still do it unless blocked.

Given that one of the main reasons people complain about Windows 10 (and Chromebooks) is the lack of privacy I’m surprised that this area does not get mentioned in terms of Linux. Or maybe I’ve just not looked in the right places (there are a bewildering number of places).

If you don’t trust a program, you shouldn’t be running it in the first place. There’s really no such thing as a program that you can trust to run on the system, but that you cannot trust to have internet access. You have to assume that if a program is allowed to run, it will be able to get internet access, whether or not you intend it. If the intent of a given program is malicious, an application level packet filter (I’ll call it ALPF) is trivially easy to bypass.

By co-opting a program that is almost certainly going to have internet access, like Firefox (present in many, if not most, Linux installations), a piece of malware can send info to a bad guy without ever triggering such a prompt. All it would have to do would be to execute a command that looks something like this:

and so on, with that string at the end (signified by the ellipsis) potentially containing any information it wants, and it would all be sent by a process (firefox) that is already allowed to pass through the firewall.

If the ALPF is combined with intrusion detection, it can be a lot more effective, but there are prices to pay for that too. If set to protect against all of the ways to co-opt other programs into doing its bidding, a sofware HIPS (host intrustion protection system) positively bombards you with popups… a price I was willing to pay when I was using Outpost Pro (firewall/ALPF/HIPS/antimalware suite) in Windows XP. As I found, being aware of the risk and being willing to accept the annoyance of constant popups doesn’t mean that you are immune to robotically hitting Accept at the wrong time.

It can also cause a rather noticeable slowdown, and it has to be very well-crafted to avoid making an otherwise rock-solid system unstable. It will be less inherently stable than a system without HIPS.

With desktop Linux, we’re small targets for malware authors. If we were talking about servers, it would be a different story… Linux servers have a lot of market share and are are big targets, and as such they are attacked regularly. On the desktop, nearly everyone uses Windows, so that’s what the baddies go after. The kinds of users who are the most likely to blunder into accidentally infecting themselves (the most common means of infection) are not typically using Linux, whose user population skews toward more advanced users. We’re not a very juicy target for malware authors.

That said, though, we still need to be careful about what we run, just as we would in Windows. Some Windows users (who should know better) just run anything that seems interesting and expect their antimalware program to protect them. They’re foolish to think that a program can replace good sense on the part of the user. Antimalware programs offer little or no protection from corporate spyware programs from the likes of Microsoft or Google… you have to do that yourself, by keeping them off your PC.

In Linux, a lot of programs are available from the distro repository, and those things are usually vetted by the distro, and can be used with relative confidence. Otherwise, make sure you’re getting any software from a known source, and that the source itself is trustworthy.

@Anonymous: one of your questions seems to amount to the question of whether Linux has firewall. It does. (It is or at least was primarily a server operating system, so of course it does.) Whether it has a firewall that is easy to use, well, that is something else. There are low-level firewalls calls iptables and ufu. These are hard to use. There is also gufu, which is a GUI for ufu. It is badly in need of a makerover but it is just about usable. (Still, the interface for Windows Firewall Control is not exactly stellar either, I fear.) There are other firewalls for Linux but I have not used them. One Linux distribution that has gufu is Mint.

Given that one of the main reasons people complain about Windows 10 (and Chromebooks) is the lack of privacy I’m surprised that this area does not get mentioned in terms of Linux. Or maybe I’ve just not looked in the right places (there are a bewildering number of places).

There is an element of personal responsibility here. We don’t allow people to drive cars (for the most part) unless they pass a written test and a drivers test. We know what would happen in that case, and it’s not good. Part of going to Linux is taking responsibility for your computing, learning about what your OS does and how to configure it. And yes, it’s harder, but it’s the best feeling in the world when you have control of things.

Here’s a couple of links that should help you setting up. I like GUFW (first link), but if you want to get down and dirty with the command line, the second link is great. Good luck!

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